In 2020, the United States Census Bureau doubled the population threshold used to designate rural communities. Prior to this shift, only cities of 2,500 people or less were considered to be rural environments. After this shift, cities as large as 5,000 people were defined within the same bracket.
Towns of 103 were suddenly as rural as cities of 4,027. This meant that communities with zero grocery stores, libraries, post offices, apartment buildings, or sewer facilities could be rendered equal to towns with all of those things plus public transit, restaurants, elderly care, and compensated elected officials. Named the same, resourced differently. Named the same, either rarely written.
Even with this 50 percent increase in qualifying criteria, 80 percent of the U.S. population still lives in urban areas. It makes sense then that a similar ratio would translate into the publishing sphere—if not an even larger one. I certainly read my fair share of New York novels, Los Angeles novels, Minneapolis novels. I don’t begrudge anyone a localized story.
Though, as a reader living in an old-definition rural place (population 1,041), I love to be thrown a bone every now and again. Like a slow-moving old dog, I love to savor them and display them, to sometimes bury them in shallow soil for safekeeping and simple return.
This though? This is me, dropping them proudly at your feet.
When this book was first published, I heard mixed reviews from library patrons. Fans of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s legendary Braiding Sweetgrass were oddly surprised to be reading about alternative economies. Myself, I found little surprising in the content of The Serviceberry but much inspiring.
While not branded as a rural narrative, Kimmerer herself acknowledges a remoteness to her place. A place where things grow, are gathered, and shared. While this is certainly not the experience of many rural communities, lushness is also not the pivotal point of this book. Biomimicry and biodiversity are, as well as what human beings might learn from those processes in nature.*
What makes this book old-definition rural is actually its approach to creative economy. In places with few jobs and resources, there is often the need for new exchange. Energy, skills, materials, and time can all be currency when the end goal is not wealth… but survival.
This is why I choose to live where I do. Only the best books have ever reminded me of that, or given me hope that there is still more to be done.
Torrey Peters’ debut novel Detransition, Baby was urban at its core and on its surface—a queer “Sex and the City.” I read it, enjoyed it, and made assumptions about its author: namely, that she must be a full-time Brooklyn resident. Stag Dance, however, is built of three short stories, a novella, and new geographies. What this book made clear to me was that I was only half right about the homeplace* of Torrey Peters.
Beginning with her story “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones,” she transports readers back and forth between Seattle and post-apocalyptic rural Iowa. There are pigs and guns, unmade beds and alcoholism. There’s that frightening, fateful feeling of running into someone in an impossible place. There’s shade from a tree and a vastness of landscape. All things that made it subtly apparent that Peters must have, at some point, touched down in the country.
For me, the other two short stories in this collection fade into the dark behind the first one and the title piece, Stag Dance. Set in a logging camp in Idaho (a familiar place for my own family) it’s true that my feelings about this novella could have taken any number of shapes. Only… I loved it.
Peters wrote the ultimate rural experiment. Isolation and desire, fear and permission, shame and elation, sound and alienation. It’s a story that quivers like firelight, that has you seeing things in the far-off shadows, that reminds you that we weren’t always surveilled except by ourselves. That asks: if gender falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, is it even real?
Craig Thompson would be the first to tell you about his hesitations in writing this book, quickly followed by similar statements from his publisher. A white man writing about ginseng, Chinese medicine, and the role of all of it in his own life? Suspect. The resulting book? Endlessly thoughtful, humanely explorative, internationally and regionally significant.
Like his beloved graphic novel Blankets, this one is also memoir… but also more. It’s an unusual and illuminated tale of small town life and agricultural toil. It follows Thompson himself through a childhood of rock-picking and weeding on ginseng farms in Wisconsin, to his return to those roots decades later, to important ginseng hotspots in South Korea, China, and Taiwan.
I enjoyed so much about this book. To start, that it was largely set in a town with a current population of 1,560—Marathon, Wisconsin. I loved that Thompson interviewed the people he had known since his youth: the farmers and families who had stayed. I cherished the adorable, anthropomorphized ginseng roots that cropped up with facts or jokes throughout.
Richly illustrated in reds and blacks and weighing in at 435 pages, Ginseng Roots might also be considered graphic journalism. Or? A time capsule for a strange history and a rural people who might have otherwise been forgotten.
Towns of 103 were suddenly as rural as cities of 4,027. This meant that communities with zero grocery stores, libraries, post offices, apartment buildings, or sewer facilities could be rendered equal to towns with all of those things plus public transit, restaurants, elderly care, and compensated elected officials. Named the same, resourced differently. Named the same, either rarely written.
Even with this 50 percent increase in qualifying criteria, 80 percent of the U.S. population still lives in urban areas. It makes sense then that a similar ratio would translate into the publishing sphere—if not an even larger one. I certainly read my fair share of New York novels, Los Angeles novels, Minneapolis novels. I don’t begrudge anyone a localized story.
Though, as a reader living in an old-definition rural place (population 1,041), I love to be thrown a bone every now and again. Like a slow-moving old dog, I love to savor them and display them, to sometimes bury them in shallow soil for safekeeping and simple return.
This though? This is me, dropping them proudly at your feet.
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer
“The prosperity of the community grows from the flow of relationships, not the accumulation of goods.”When this book was first published, I heard mixed reviews from library patrons. Fans of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s legendary Braiding Sweetgrass were oddly surprised to be reading about alternative economies. Myself, I found little surprising in the content of The Serviceberry but much inspiring.
While not branded as a rural narrative, Kimmerer herself acknowledges a remoteness to her place. A place where things grow, are gathered, and shared. While this is certainly not the experience of many rural communities, lushness is also not the pivotal point of this book. Biomimicry and biodiversity are, as well as what human beings might learn from those processes in nature.*
What makes this book old-definition rural is actually its approach to creative economy. In places with few jobs and resources, there is often the need for new exchange. Energy, skills, materials, and time can all be currency when the end goal is not wealth… but survival.
This is why I choose to live where I do. Only the best books have ever reminded me of that, or given me hope that there is still more to be done.
*Sounds similar to her other works, no?
Stag Dance by Torrey Peters
“Only a short time ago, I had been top axeman. I called my falls. And any and all knew not to bet against me. And yet, what? A triangle had changed this? Made me blamesome for all and sundry, even and maybe especially by those who had done a turn of dance at my waist?”Torrey Peters’ debut novel Detransition, Baby was urban at its core and on its surface—a queer “Sex and the City.” I read it, enjoyed it, and made assumptions about its author: namely, that she must be a full-time Brooklyn resident. Stag Dance, however, is built of three short stories, a novella, and new geographies. What this book made clear to me was that I was only half right about the homeplace* of Torrey Peters.
Beginning with her story “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones,” she transports readers back and forth between Seattle and post-apocalyptic rural Iowa. There are pigs and guns, unmade beds and alcoholism. There’s that frightening, fateful feeling of running into someone in an impossible place. There’s shade from a tree and a vastness of landscape. All things that made it subtly apparent that Peters must have, at some point, touched down in the country.
For me, the other two short stories in this collection fade into the dark behind the first one and the title piece, Stag Dance. Set in a logging camp in Idaho (a familiar place for my own family) it’s true that my feelings about this novella could have taken any number of shapes. Only… I loved it.
Peters wrote the ultimate rural experiment. Isolation and desire, fear and permission, shame and elation, sound and alienation. It’s a story that quivers like firelight, that has you seeing things in the far-off shadows, that reminds you that we weren’t always surveilled except by ourselves. That asks: if gender falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, is it even real?
*Brooklyn, yes, but also occasionally an off-grid cabin in Vermont.
Ginseng Roots by Craig Thompson
“There is this great wisdom that can be gained through the SHENNONG body, which is the FARMER body, which is the body that is LABORING, that is actually DOING, that is actually EMBODYING. Exploring reality and literally DIGESTING it.”Craig Thompson would be the first to tell you about his hesitations in writing this book, quickly followed by similar statements from his publisher. A white man writing about ginseng, Chinese medicine, and the role of all of it in his own life? Suspect. The resulting book? Endlessly thoughtful, humanely explorative, internationally and regionally significant.
Like his beloved graphic novel Blankets, this one is also memoir… but also more. It’s an unusual and illuminated tale of small town life and agricultural toil. It follows Thompson himself through a childhood of rock-picking and weeding on ginseng farms in Wisconsin, to his return to those roots decades later, to important ginseng hotspots in South Korea, China, and Taiwan.
I enjoyed so much about this book. To start, that it was largely set in a town with a current population of 1,560—Marathon, Wisconsin. I loved that Thompson interviewed the people he had known since his youth: the farmers and families who had stayed. I cherished the adorable, anthropomorphized ginseng roots that cropped up with facts or jokes throughout.
Richly illustrated in reds and blacks and weighing in at 435 pages, Ginseng Roots might also be considered graphic journalism. Or? A time capsule for a strange history and a rural people who might have otherwise been forgotten.